This is a really smart acquisition. WordPress continues to dominate the CMS market. With the upcoming REST API, it's only going to get better. I'm watching niche CMS industry after niche CMS industry crumble under the continual migration to WordPress.
The latest victims are the small CMS vendors who have been selling proprietary CMS solutions to public school districts for the past 15 years, charging far too much money (your U.S. taxpayer dollars!) for barely functional CMS's. The FCC voted recently to prohibit spending federal money on these solutions, a practice that basically created the market, so now every school district in the U.S. (14,000+) are looking around for cheaper and better solutions. A large percentage of them are migrating to WordPress.
E-Rate is a major funding source for school Internet connections and is ran by the FCC. The sidebar on that article says:
"Phases out support for some non-broadband services, such as voice services; and eliminates support for others, such as email, Web-hosting, paging, and components of telephone service such as text-messaging and directory assistance."
I'm guessing it relates to that "web-hosting" bit.
Yes, that is exactly right. Public school districts can no longer use E-Rate (federal money) funds to pay for web site hosting or web site management systems. The FCC decided to re-allocate $5 billion in E-Rate funds for a 5-year wifi roll-out plan for all public school districts.
Drupal is a great platform as well. I work with K-12 school districts every day and the majority are not choosing Drupal because the support and custom Drupal development needed is too expensive. Instead, they are choosing WordPress.
The exception is the higher education market (colleges and universities), who are choosing Drupal over WordPress.
This is great, if....the school software vendors adopt it as a standard and allow their systems to be Clever-enabled.
I work for a large school district and a large majority of our vendor solutions come with their own proprietary, locked-down technologies. When queried, some of these vendors see the writing on the wall and say they are working on integrating with Clever while others keep their heads stuck in the sand while counting their millions of taxpayer dollars spent on overly-complex, un-flexible and un-interoperable solutions.
I believe this is the why our Armed Forces recruiters often have the names, addresses and phone numbers of our graduating seniors every year. It's usually up to the school administrators to release this information upon request, and most do. Private schools do not have this issue.
Normally I don't upvote posts like yours but I did here. I'm not sure why every article on Medium (that I see posted on HN) has to have that word in the title. Eventually it just loses its impact. Maybe it's to grab attention, but then I would say more thought needs to go into the headline anyway.
I think the swearwords are particularly fitting here. Using swear words for no good reason is a decent indicator of immaturity, and this rant is one of the more immature things I've read lately. Some type of entitled flailing, so much so that he actually believes he can force his reality on the world.
Most successful designers need at least a small amount of natural talent. You can be taught the principals of design in school or you can pick them up from books, but without some small amount of natural talent you will be just another average designer doing average crap.
The key to success as a designer is succeeding at delivering the right kind of design to you clients. If you want mediocre, pay the $99 for a logo from some offshore logo shop. If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement. If you want a great designer then you need to seek out those who pay attention to the details and spend the extra 20 hrs in Adobe Illustrator finessing the lines or the late nights worrying about kerning every last letter.
If you want a web site that looks like it was shat our of Twitter Bootstrap with 20 lines of CSS changed, then by all means hire someone who doesn't care to do anything more than the bare minimum to meet your requirement
That actually made me laugh because 90% of the people we see think that is design.
This is tough. I've known Tim for a long, long time and he's always been a stand-up guy with amazing ethics and vision. I also know Laurie and worked with her briefly when I was helping to co-author a long-forgotten O'Reilly book on Mozilla applications. She's a good editor.
I also tremendously respect Stephen Few's body of work and own all of his books. There is no doubt he's a leader in the field of information visualization.
What I think Stephen is missing here is a discussion about or the acknowledgement that the printed book industry is one of very low margins. It's entirely possible that the issues he is complaining about are a result of the O'Reilly print production managers choosing lower-quality sources and suppliers -- something O'Reilly doesn't have a history of. They pioneered the RepKover lay-flat binding, which costs a lot more than traditional binding. The cost of producing Stephen's book to the standards he expected was probably far too high for O'Reilly to have been able to make any profit on it at all without literally doubling the price. There is a reason that beautifully printed and produced architecture books, art history books and specialty books cost between $50 and $200 each.
O'Reilly must have recognized by Mr. Few's demands that these expensive details mattered to him or else they would not have signed the contract. But they did. Belly-ache all day about the margins and practical difficulties inherent in printing a book to Mr. Few's standards, but they signed it to get the deal and then broke their word. What is he missing about that, the central theme of this piece?
P.S. $50 to $200? O'Reilly sells their poorly bound books at the low-to-middle of that range. You are not helping them by mentioning what a nicely printed book costs.
I'm sure it's not what you're suggesting but low margins aren't an excuse for breaching a contract or doing a poor job of printing. If it can't be done at the right quality economically, it's better to not do the job at all which is what the contract seems to have been trying to guarantee.
Print media is in decline and will only lose more ground now to digital media, which of course has a significant cost advantage. Perhaps publishers should recognise that now and aim towards a niche of fewer very high quality prints that are as much aesthetic as practical. The price increase which is inevitable in any case as volumes drop might not look so bad then.
